The field of the disclosure relates generally to collecting monitored data from industrial system devices and, more particularly, to systems and methods for improving the efficiency of collecting data from multiple system devices in an industrial system.
In many industrial systems, an operable system device (e.g., a control valve) is controlled and monitored by a computer-driven plant network. The plant network, also known as a distributed control system, connects the operable system devices to at least one computer. This connection takes many forms including direct wired connections between each system device and the computer, e.g., over a bus network, or system devices wirelessly transmitting data to a computer. In many embodiments, the plant network is an interface for both sending control commands to individual system devices in the industrial system, and retrieving data from the system devices themselves.
Plant networks are used extensively in networked industrial systems as an interface for both sending control commands to individual operable system devices and extracting performance data from the operable system devices. The latter function is a critical component of the “Industrial Internet,” whereby advanced analytics, including prognostic and diagnostic algorithms, are applied both locally and remotely to deployed machines in industrial settings. In some situations, e.g., when testing system devices, the system devices cannot be removed from their surroundings, and instead, the system devices need to be observed under actual operating conditions to provide good data for analysis.
However, in many plant networks the bandwidth for collecting data from operable system devices is limited. Often these systems can only collect sample data from one system device at a time and only at a low sample rate (e.g., one set of sample data every 3 seconds). Typically, the monitoring system will collect a fixed number of data samples from an individual system device, and then move on to the next system device, collecting samples from each system device in turn. Furthermore, in many practical settings, a large majority of data collected is not actually useful. When system devices are idle or inactive, for example, data collected from them may not be usable for either key performance indicators, or for making predictive and diagnostic assessments. Due to limited bandwidth, the opportunities for collecting useful data are lost when idle/inactive system devices are sampled instead.
For example in these typical monitoring systems, the monitoring system takes samples from a first system device for a fixed number of samples, e.g., about 120 or for a set period of time, e.g., about 5 minutes. At the end of that set period of time, the monitoring system selects a different operable system device and takes samples from it for a set period of time. Whether or not the data is useful for analysis purposes is not known until the data is analyzed. This is an inefficient method of data collection because a substantial period of time may be expended collecting data that is not useful.